Winter and summer, all the food was cooked in a great big
fireplace, about four feet wide, and you could put on a whole stick of
cord wood at a time. When they wanted plenty of hot ashes to bake with,
they burnt wood from ash trees. Sweet potatoes and bread was baked in
the ashes. Seems like vittuls don't taste as good as they used to, when
we cooked like that. 'Possums, Oh! I dearly love 'possums. My cousins
used to catch 'em and when they was fixed up and cooked with sweet
potatoes, 'possum meat was fit for a king. Marse Billy had a son named
Mark, what was a little bitty man. They said he was a dwarf. He never
done nothing but play with the children on the plantation. He would take
the children down to the crick what run through the plantation and fish
all day. We had rabbits, but they was most generally caught in a box
trap, so there warn't no time wasted a-huntin' for 'em.
"In summer, the slave women wore white homespun and the men wore pants
and shirts made out of cloth what looked like overall cloth does now. In
winter, we wore the same things, 'cept Marse Billy give the men woolen
coats what come down to their knees, and the women wore warm wraps what
they called sacks.
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